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It’s not just students who have a lurch in their stomachs during back to school week. Parents do, too. Getting kids to school on some days requires the organizational precision of a space launch. (NASA, we have a problem.)But it’s also the psychological pressure of helping your children become well-educated, not to mention successful.

There is no more important job than being your child’s advocate, being able to say to a doubting or frustrated teacher: look, you have a special kid here. He’s been reading Shakespeare since he was 9. She writes stories and draws pictures all day long. Helicopter parenting has nothing to do with it. We don’t want our children’s gifts, however modest, to go overlooked or un-nurtured in what can be an unresponsive, overburdened system.

I sent two kids through the public school system and despite their ups and downs, they graduated from two fine universities. Still, I worried too much along the way. Sometimes they got questionable marks, sometimes they screwed up in other imaginative ways: “Mom, Dad, I’ve made an error in judgment” I recall my teenage daughter saying as she was escorted home by police who’d caught her and friends climbing fences and pool hopping in the dark.

But basically, they got decent educations and turned out fine.

Which brings me to the guy at a dinner who said recently: “I wish I hadn’t worried so much when my kids were young — like about developmental issues. I was always obsessing, ‘were they on track?’ ”

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Me too. Not everything was the big honking issue we made it out to be. (Like the friend who sobbed because her 5-year-old son had “failed scissors”.)You would never know it in this era of endless parenting advice. (How to drop your kid off at school, how to pick him up, how to ignore bad clothing choices, how to greet him after a bad day. How to talk (firmly) to teachers. How to get her to do homework, how to bully-proof him, how to make sure they get ahead.) It’s like reading a high-tech user’s manual.

I twisted myself into a pretzel during those early school years. Here are five things I wish I hadn’t obsessed over :

1. Their physical safety. Honestly, I was so paranoid I’m sure I scarred them for life. If I could have transported them in an army tank to school in our downtown ‘hood I would have. I actually made them travel to and fro on a school bus instead of walking them the very few blocks in the early years and then letting them go together on their own. They should have been walking in a group from the get go.

2. Worrying if the teacher was “a good fit.” Please. Teachers are supposed to teach, not spend hours trying to “get” the delicate psyches of each student. No wonder educators feel burned out today. The best teachers do go that extra mile to understand their students. But like adults, kids also need to learn how to deal with all types, and oddball teachers are necessary life lessons, too. Kids will survive.

3. The school project arms race. Whales nearly turned me into an alcoholic. Every year, the ante was upped — flashier, fancier parent-“assisted” projects. I resisted much of the parental power pointing but I was still much too involved, which defeated the purpose of projects: getting kids to use their imaginations and creativity to address a certain subject. To this day, whales make me crave a glass of wine.

4. Battles over homework. There shouldn’t be homework in elementary school, and even older kids sometimes need a break, not a relentless to-do list. One teacher said to me: “You can’t make them want to do it.” Eventually, they found their own motivation.

5. Every grade less than A. Thisshould not have merited grave concern. My son, perusing his old uneven report cards, asked me recently, “what were you on about?” He was right. As psychologist Madeline Levine wrote in her book Teach Your Children Well, our obsession with success has turned our children into “trauma victims. Every measure of child and adolescent mental health has deteriorated since we’ve decided that children are best served by being relentlessly pushed, overloaded, and tested,” she writes.

The boy who loved Shakespeare became a theatre producer. The girl who loved to draw is finishing a masters in history — in French — and living in Paris. I’m grateful to a school system that, however imperfect, helped them become who they wanted to be.

Now if only I could get back those years of worry.

Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson

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